


Remo's Return

by KarenHunt



Category: Sharing Knife - Lois McMaster Bujold
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-26
Updated: 2010-08-26
Packaged: 2017-10-11 06:31:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/109480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KarenHunt/pseuds/KarenHunt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Remo arrives at Pearl Riffle</p>
            </blockquote>





	Remo's Return

As evening set in and time to make camp for the night arrived, Remo Lynx looked over his little patrol. Rase Poplar, age nineteen, had a good horse, but he was only just returned to full strength after his bout with blight-sickness. Barr Bluejay, age twenty, was riding a gentle farm horse and was only barely able to walk with the aid of a stick. The two farmer boys Ash Tanner and Finch Bridger, both age nineteen, were in better shape, but nobody would mistake them for patrollers; nor would anyone mistake their plow horses or Finch's two mules for patrol horses. They made a strange-looking group, that was all there was to it.

As for himself as their patrol leader, well, at least he had a good horse and he didn't have any injuries worse than some nearly-healed bruises. The swelling on his ear was down, too. He recalled Hawthorn's distress when they met up after getting scattered hither and yon by the Bat Malice. The boy was upset about how he'd hit Remo with a rock, and Remo's protests that he couldn't help what he did went unheeded. Finally, Remo had taken hold of Hawthorn's head with one hand and clipped him in the ear, middling hard, with the other.

"Ow!"

"There. Now we're even. If you ever try that without a malice forcing you to do it, I'll be a lot angrier."

Hawthorn had smiled and rubbed his ear. He agreed they could keep being friends and went off to help gather wood for the evening fire.

Remo didn't think a similar trick would help with his upcoming meeting with Amma Osprey and his tent-kin at Pearl Riffle. As the leader of his little patrol, he ought to be well fitted-out. However, unlike Rase and Barr, and even Ash, he was riding weaponless. The evening after that awful council meeting last fall, his papa had confiscated his bow, spear, and war knife. He'd claimed that Remo couldn't be trusted with an adult's weapons and tried to go farther by giving him a child's slingshot in their place. Remo had run out of the tent and spent the night in the woods, alone with a small fire and no bedroll. The following afternoon he'd returned to the tent while everyone else was away, but only for long enough to collect his most important possessions. The night after that was when he went out to talk to Dag, beginning the wildest adventure of his life.

After his little patrol made camp and finished taking care of their horses, they sat five around the campfire for dinner. They were about half a day's journey from Pearl Riffle camp; Remo still wasn't sure he wanted to arrive there. He looked into the fire for a few minutes, then cleared his throat to speak. "Rase, there's something you ought to know since you'll be staying with us at Pearl Riffle for a time. It's sure to come up, and I don't want you to hear about it for the first time from them. See, there's a reason me and Barr went traveling with Dag down the Grace and Gray rivers. I ran off from camp, see, and Barr followed; he was supposed to bring me back, but I wouldn't go and so he stayed with us." He swallowed and looked uneasily at Rase, Ash, and Finch; they didn't seem too distressed at learning he'd been a deserter. He then explained how he'd received a sharing knife primed with his great-grandmother's death and how it had gotten broken, wasting her death, when he and Barr got into a fight with some of the local farmers. Rase closed his ground and his eyes in distress; even Ash and Finch understood how terrible a thing this was.

Barr spoke up. "It was more my fault than Remo's. I let myself get drawn into that fight when I should've known better than to even be outside of camp; Remo came to my rescue."

Remo shook his head. "It was enough my fault. Anyway, I couldn't stand to be around Pearl Riffle any more, so I joined up with Dag. He'd hired on as a sweepsman on one of the flatboats that was going to be heading down the Grace, and so I did the same."

Rase said tentatively, "I guess you'd not have gotten to know about him and his quest otherwise. Does it help, knowing all that you've done and that you can be part of changing how we do patrolling?"

Remo's mouth twisted. "Help, yes. Don't know if it was worth the price or not. I do know I don't want to lose all the things I learned traveling with Dag. I just wish it hadn't cost so much to gain them."

The following morning, they started out soon after dawn. It was almost noon when they reached Pearl Riffle's ferry. As leader of his group, Remo reached out with his groundsense to let Issi Catfish, the ferrywoman, know they were approaching. As soon as they reached the ferry, she grabbed him by the shoulders; angry and relieved both at the same time, she demanded, "Where have you two been? Barr, what happened to your leg? Who's this you have with you? Do you two have any idea how much trouble you're in?" Her questions went for more than a minute, with no letup between them to allow any answers.

When she paused for breath, Remo gulped and said, "Well, we went by flatboat all the way to Graymouth and we saw the sea, then we came back by way of the Tripoint Trace. Barr broke his leg getting dropped onto rocks. This here is Rase Poplar New Elm, from south Raintree; he's planning to stay with us for a bit, then go north as an exchange patroller; and these two are Ash Tanner and Finch Bridger. They're from the south and they're headed to northern Oleana to break ground to farm." He paused while he tried to figure out how to answer the rest of her questions.

She stared at him. "You're traveling with _farmers_? You'd best not be thinking of bringing them into Pearl Riffle!" She hustled them onto the ferry and it started across the river. "You've got some explaining to do, that's all I can say. I suppose you might as well wait on telling your tale until we can get the council and your families together to decide what to do with the two of you. You'd do well to think about how to keep Amma Osprey from having your hides for tentflaps."

When they reached the north side of the river, Ash and Finch headed off to continue their journey north. They wanted to be sure to reach Glassforge tomorrow, so they planned to put in a full day today. Remo, Barr, and Rase waved farewell; Issi shook her head in exasperation. As she led them to Pearl Riffle, Remo remembered Dag's words about how camp wasn't going to look the same as before. He'd not guessed how much change this was turning out to be -- just watching how Issi acted toward Ash and Finch was a surprise already, and he hadn't even reached camp yet. Had he really been so ignorant of farmers and so sure of his superiority to them? Remembering how his journey started out, he supposed he really had been just the same once himself.

Entering camp, Remo saw a much poorer community than he expected. Just the short time that he'd spent in the south had shown him that there was much his folk could gain from dealing more with the local farmers. He didn't have time to think about it, though, because Issi whisked him straight to patrol headquarters without a pause. Word was also passing ahead of them by way of one of the gate guards; no sooner did he arrive inside headquarters than so did a middle-aged woman, distantly tent-kin to him, who he expected was on this summer's camp council. There was a bustle of activity over the next few minutes; at the end, there were two women from the camp council, Issi, Amma, his family, and Barr's family all standing in a half-circle facing him and Barr and Rase. Issi reported that Verel would be along in a few minutes to check on Barr's leg; he was dealing with a patient, but he'd come as soon as he could afterward.

Amma folded her arms and gave Remo and Barr her best glare. Really, though, both Dag and Arkady could do it much better -- so could Sumac, for that matter; it just wasn't as frightening as it used to be. It also helped remembering that Sumac had promised to let him exchange at Hickory Lake, later. He held his head up and looked straight back at her. She started in by stating flatly, "If you two imagine you can get out of trouble because of helping deal with those bandits last fall, you can think again. You lost your chances for that when you didn't come back right then."

When neither Remo nor Barr looked particularly hangdog in response, she seemed to be at a bit of a loss for how to continue. They stood looking at her silently. After a moment, she came up with, "You, Remo, can start by explaining this much right now. Did that Red-Blue renegade talk you into joining him?"

Rase gave Remo a perplexed look. His mouth shaped the words _Red-Blue?_ but he held his peace. Remo folded his arms back at Amma and said, "His name is Dag Bluefield and he's no renegade. You can call him by his proper name or I'm not telling you anything."

Amma started a longish lecture about his some-nerve. He tried out Dag's bland-faced blinking trick a few times; it did seem to throw her off her stride to be getting blinks with no words back. Verel showed up at the start of the lecture and made a beeline for Barr. Kneeling beside his leg to examine it better, he waited until Amma wound down and then asked, "Barr, what happened to your leg, and who did the groundwork here?"

Barr glanced at Remo, who shook his head slightly. Barr folded his arms and jerked his chin towards Remo. Verel looked at Remo, who jerked his own chin towards Amma.

Verel addressed himself to her. "Amma, I don't think it's too much to ask to call the fellow Dag Bluefield. I'd really like to know what's happened to Barr's leg -- the groundwork here is amazing."

When she didn't budge, Verel said, "I might add that Issi says they came north from off the Tripoint Trace, and that the injury to Barr's leg looks to be about two weeks old -- just about the right time and place to match that strange malice emergence that had us all in a panic."

Amma turned from Verel back to Remo. "Were you two there?"

Remo didn't answer, but a small smile played on his lips.

Amma sighed in exasperation. "All right, then! Did Dag Bluefield talk you into going traveling down the river with him?"

Remo unfolded his arms and stood at attention. "No, ma'am, he did not. After things went so bad that day last fall, I decided I couldn't stand being here any more, so next morning I asked our knife-maker to make me a bonded knife so's I could replace great-grandmama's one. He wouldn't do it. So I reckoned there wasn't anything else to do but drown myself. But when I went to the river, I saw the flatboats along it and I remembered Dag was in one of 'em and he was going far away down to Graymouth. I thought maybe since he was all alone he might like a partner. If he wouldn't take me, I could do the river anyway. So the next night I swam across and asked him to let me come with him."

Amma rolled her eyes. "And I suppose he was pretty pleased to take you?"

"Not hardly he wasn't. Acted like it was the dumbest idea he'd ever heard. Said things like _my road is not for you _and _the best thing you can do is swim back across and pretend this conversation didn't happen. _That's when I told him about my plan to swim halfway back."

"That was enough to change his mind, was it?"

"No! He sat there looking like he was trying to figure out how to get me to swim back across without stopping halfway. Then Fawn, his wife, came out and told me I could spend the night with them. She said she was an expert at running away from home and that plans made in the middle of the night weren't best. She also said I'd be able to come up with a much better one in the morning after breakfast. Dag said that was the best offer I'd get, so I agreed. In the morning, after breakfast, I asked him again. He still didn't like the idea; he said he wasn't going to be my patrol leader and if I wanted passage I had to talk to the boat boss, Berry, and not to him. It was when I was talking to her that I got the better idea. Dag'd hired on as a sweepsman; if I did the same, I'd still get to go traveling with him and maybe I could show him I was worth having along and he'd change his mind about taking me as a partner. It took a while to figure out how to get him to have anything to do with me -- I don't think he even spoke once to me for the first three or four days. I guess he must've been hoping I'd give up and go home."

Amma was still looking skeptical. "And just what did it take to get him to take you on, anyway?"

"Mostly I had to start treating farmers like people instead of like animals. Talk to 'em and such."

Amma's lip curled. Plainly she thought this was a pretty bad thing to have to do. Remo, now rather offended, continued with, "There's lots that's worth knowing about farmers! Lots more than I ever guessed before. Fawn, she's the sharpest person I ever met, and she makes a breakfast anyone would want to stay for. Her brother Whit was a pain at first, but he's sharp too, and he's real good at buyin' and sellin' and such. Then there's Boss Berry -- she's married to Whit now; she knows the whole river backward and forward. And she's the best fiddler I ever heard. Her uncle Bo likes drinking too much, but he knows the river too and he can tell more tall tales than anyone I've met -- I don't think I ever heard him repeat a single tale, except by someone askin'. And there's Berry's brother Hawthorn, who's twelve. If you don't look at his ground, you'd almost think he might be a patroller when he grows up. Hod's not that sharp, but he's a good kid who works hard and helps out with Bo when he gets too drunk. We met other farmers going down the river and back up the road -- they're lots more interesting than I ever guessed they'd be." He needed to take several breaths after that spate.

Mostly people were now looking askance at him and Barr. Amma turned to Barr and said, "You were supposed to bring him back here. Why didn't you do so?"

Barr gave her his best innocent look, saying, "I did bring him back. See?"

Amma glared at him and said, "You were supposed to bring him back _last fall_."

Barr blinked and smiled. "Well, you see, I caught up with them just after Silver Shoals, yes, but Remo didn't want to go back. I tried arguin', but I couldn't make him turn around. So after a bit, I decided that if I wanted to be a good partner to him -- someone who could be trusted watching his partner's back and fighting alongside him, then I ought to go with him. So I did. By the time we finished helping deal with Crane and the river-bandits, I was wanting to go forward, too. Graymouth and the sea are amazing." He didn't say anything about the dressing-down Dag had given him that had turned his thinking around, but Remo didn't feel a need to put in the correction.

When Amma didn't immediately go on the offensive, Verel spoke up. "Barr, who did the groundwork on your leg? Was that Dag's doing?"

Barr looked down at Verel. "Not Dag. Dag's teacher, Arkady. He's a groundsetter from New Moon Cutoff down in the south. See, Dag was gettin' real confused about all these new things he was suddenly being able to do while we were goin' down the rivers; he didn't know it was normal groundsetter potential and all. So me and Remo and Dag and Fawn all went to Arkady's camp to see about getting help for him, and his help was to take Dag on as his apprentice. When Dag left to go back north again a few months into his apprenticing, Arkady decided to go with him."

Verel's brow wrinkled. "Since when does a top-notch maker travel anywhere? Never mind, I've a more important question: Where are they now, where will they be living? Might we be able to send patients to them from time to time, perhaps?"

Remo answered this one. "I expect they're not far from their new home, just outside the village of Clearcreek. It wasn't a much longer ride than ours. They plan to live with Berry and Whit Bluefield. I don't know about sending patients to them, but I don't think they'd mind. Anyhow, you can ask them soon. They'll all be by in a week or two; Sumac Redwing -- she's a patrol leader from Hickory Lake and she's Dag's niece -- is coming to take Rase, here, with her to exchange up there. Barr and I have invitations to go north too, if we want."

Barr spoke up with, "She's not going to stay there herself, though, on account of she's with Arkady -- I reckon they'll likely be string-bound by the time we see them."

Rase added, "I'm planning to spend the time till they arrive visiting here and learning how a ferry camp works."

Verel shook his head dizzily. Everyone, including Verel, looked like they were trying to run all this through their heads a second time in hopes that it would make better sense after another pass. It didn't look like they were having much luck.

Amma said slowly, with a note of perplexity, "I'm not sure I follow. That Dag fellow and his farmer-girl wife are planning to live not that far upriver from us -- inside our patrol territory, in fact -- together with a group of farmers and a southern groundsetter who's his teacher and with his niece who's a patrol leader who might or might not be string-bound to the groundsetter? And they'll all come by in a week or two to collect one or more of you to take you north to Hickory Lake, except that none of them plan to stay there themselves? Am I hearing right?"

Remo, Barr, and Rase all nodded.

She frowned at them. "We'll just have to see whether we even want to let them in, much less whether we let them take anyone away from here!"

Verel frowned back at her. "For myself, I wouldn't mind being on friendly terms with them. Two people who can do groundsetting living near enough that we could maybe send folk over to them to be treated is not something to throw aside. Look at Barr's leg yourself, Amma. I'd never be able to do anything like this."

She examined it from where she was standing. She was a bit of a distance from Barr and and she lacked a maker's sensitivity, but even so, there was no mistaking the extremely complex and powerful working that had gone into reassembling Barr's leg. She rubbed her lips, then turned to Rase. "Who are you, and how are you part of all this? Where are you from?"

Rase swallowed. "I'm Rase Poplar. Last fall, Sumac Redwing accompanied my cousin Tel down to New Elm, my winter camp -- it's in south Raintree. Tel'd just finished an exchange at Hickory Lake, see. She spent the winter training us in northern patrolling techniques, and then she invited me to come north with her when she returned in the spring. My family gave me a knife primed with my great-grandfather's death for the exchange. We reached the Tripoint Trace a bit south of Mutton Hash and were starting north along it when we met up with Dag and Arkady and a bunch of other people, most of them farmers, also heading north. We joined with them to travel as a group -- they say it's safer to go that way on the Trace. Well, Sumac and Arkady took a real liking to each other right off. We met up with Berry Bluefield and her kin at Mutton Hash, and that's where Sumac and I learned about Dag's quest. Do you know about it?"

Amma nodded skeptically. The look on her face wasn't particularly favorable. "A lot of swamp gas, if you ask me."

Rase answered heatedly, "He knows what he's talking about! My home camp took in some people from Bone Marsh -- they were tent-kin to a man who'd exchanged up there some years back and got string-bound -- they had the most awful tales about that malice and its mud-men and mind-slaved farmers. Dag said how if a malice took over a town like Mutton Hash or Tripoint or Silver Shoals, it'd be making lots of weapons like bows and things and arming thousands of farmers and we'd never be able to win that war! He's trying to find a way to keep that from happening before it's too late, and he's maybe found one. I sure hope he has, 'cause I don't ever want to see a malice like that."

Amma said, "Well, maybe he's afraid about that, but we've had a thousand years without it happening yet. So maybe I don't need to worry about it and neither do other captains. Why should he think he knows so much about this danger?"

Remo frowned. "Maybe because he does know. You already know Fairbolt Crow gave him the job of captaining to deal with that Raintree malice. Did you also know he's the main person they used to pick over at Hickory Lake to figure out how to keep bad malice emergences from repeating? He says it's mostly looking at lots of patrol logs and sorting out who went where and when and who didn't go where and when. He says when we write reports we should at least try to write neat enough that folk like him can figure out what we did later. And did you know he's killed twenty-six malices? Or that he was the captain up at Wolf Ridge twenty-one years ago?"

Amma and the others all looked stunned.

Rase continued the tale, "Anyway, Dag figured out how to make these ground shields, as he calls them. He made two, one for Fawn and the other for her brother Whit. Arkady made a third one, for Berry. When we got past the second mountain pass going north, the one before the Blackwater Mills pass, we met up with a malice going south on the Trace. It was new-hatched, and Dag led us patrollers to go after it. He let Whit Bluefield take part in the fight, too, and his shield worked just fine. I killed the malice with my great-grandfather's knife, but I got blight-sick. I'm better now. Next day we found out why a new-hatched malice would be traveling on the road -- it was fleeing from a worse malice. We've been calling that one the Bat Malice, on account of it having lived in a bat cavern all its life. It got lots of molts from baby bats, so it made all its mud-men into flying mud-bats that could pick people up and carry them away."

The three of them took turns describing the events of two weeks ago. When they got to how Fawn and Whit and Berry killed the Bat Malice, Amma sat abruptly. Fortunately, there was actually a chair behind her. Remo found himself, along with Barr and Rase, answering quite a few questions about those events; it took confirming statements from all three of them, repeated a few times each, to convince a few of the people there that they were speaking truly. When they finally finished, and Amma had promised to make sure Verel knew to come over when Sumac, Arkady, Dag, Fawn, Whit, and Berry arrived, the meeting broke up. Remo went home to his family tent, and Barr to his. Rase ended up being put up in a patroller family's tent near Barr's place.

After dinner that night, Remo told his parents that he was planning to accept Sumac's offer to exchange north. "I want my weapons back, please. I'll buy new if I have to -- I have plenty of money from dealing with the bandits, but I'd rather have the old ones. It's not so good having to use cudgels against bandits and mud-men, you know."

His papa agreed to return his weapons to him. He tried to make something of a "now you've learned your lesson" out of the affair, but fortunately that ended quickly when Remo responded with a few Dag-style blinks. His mama even went out to some nearby tents to find him a new primed knife; Remo figured on getting himself a bonded knife the next day. His great-grandmama had willed one of her thighbones to him as well as the primed knife; he hoped she'd approve of what he'd gotten from her sacrifice. He wasn't sure even now if his learning was equal to the cost, but he was sure that no other coin could have gotten it for him.


End file.
